-on everything she wants to ;)

Although I have been doing very-little non-research e-readings over the past few days, I found certain interesting things worth noting down.

I was browsing through the BBC website and realized that BBC is in Hindi. I assumed that the articles might be of poor quality, just the way Google News provides us with sub-standard Telugu news. But, I am wrong. I randomly opened a piece on life on the other planets, and found it to be a good article. I searched for the original on BBC, and found that the Hindi version is not a line-to-line translation. I am happy!🙂. Amazing that they are coming up with good content in so many languages. Hope to see Telugu sometime soon (since Tamil also exists as of now, in their list).
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This piece by P.Sainath, on a variation of “paid news”, was a good read. Although I enjoy his satire a lot, this time, it took a while for me to figure out what exactly is going on in the article. Putting those thoughts aside, though I can’t watch Indian news channels, I guess I can understand what is happening. I guess the days of DD were far better in terms of news coverage, despite the fact that we never had a choice!🙂
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There was another BBC article (English) titled “Why does every person need 200kg of steel every year” with scary pictures of the amount of “material offspring” we are all producing. I can’t comment much on this…but hopefully, our management guru Halley will do soon🙂. Ofcourse, let me confess that reading such articles always make me worried about the future.
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I was reading a piece on “Lexical Diversity” by Philip McCarthy. Putting aside the fact that I struggled to proceed, because of information overload (Sigh!), I was stuck by this part:

“Thus, LD has been used by researchers in fields as varied as stylistics, neuropathology, language acquisition, data mining, and forensics; and LD indices have been found to be indicative of writing quality, vocabulary knowledge, speaker competence, Alzheimer’s onset, hearing variation, and even speaker socioeconomic status”

-Wow! As I read more on that part of it, in a literature survey by the same person, there were many more interesting applications to the concept. More on it later…but, was amazed by the diversity in application areas!
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Since it has been ages that I saw it, I opened BangaloreMirror today😛. I would call it the most entertaining newspaper in Bangalore, for various reasons. Sometimes, its also educative, though no one bothers to see that angle. The very first item I found was on Putin’s new twin brother in China. It was a headline news in BM! BM Rox🙂
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I will end this session, with a piece by Jorge Luis Borges, on “The Analytical Language of Wilkins” (about which I blogged a while ago, here). Although it did not provide any new insights (except for the references to more artificial languages), I liked the quote by G.K.Chesterton mentioned in the end:

He knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless and more nameless, than the colours of an autumn forest… Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilised stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside, noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire. (G. F. Watts, page 88, 1904)